Why Aren’t I Surprised that the Media Got it Wrong AGAIN?

Wednesday afternoon we got a voicemail from a reporter at Newsweek asking SafeMinds how much money we spent on a primate vaccine safety study that was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We weren’t sure why Newsweek wanted this dollar figure, and what relevance it had in the endless mudslinging in the vaccine-autism debates.

We sent the reporter this following statement:

“The epidemic of autism is expected to cost the country $1 trillion by 2025 if prevalence trends continue. In a recent study, over 40 percent of parents agree or strongly agree that vaccines played a part in the development of their children’s autism. The vaccine primate study in question consisted of multiple phases. The initial phase found a series of negative effects in infant reflexes and brain growth among those exposed to vaccines. The second, recent phase purported to find no effect. SafeMinds has concerns about changes in the study design protocol and analysis that may have led to these contradictory results. We are in the process of collecting and reviewing additional information regarding this study.”

The reporter, Jessica Firger, told us she was delaying her article until she could speak with us directly about the statement. We thought this was a good sign, so Thursday afternoon my colleague and SafeMinds Board President, Sallie Bernard, and I spoke with Firger for about 20 minutes by phone.

We explained that we had no preconceived notion of what the outcome of the study should have been but that we were quite perplexed that the recently published findings—that show no correlation between vaccines administered to primates and autism-like neuroanatomy and behaviors—are at such great odds with the scientific findings that have been reported from this study, both in published literature and in a poster presentation at a scientific conference in 2013, using the same monkeys that were reported on in the study.

Earlier findings of phase one of this study, which SafeMinds has been funding since 2003, were published in 2010 in Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis and the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health. Researchers then reported that the infant primates exposed to the vaccines displayed a different pattern of maturational changes in the brain and also evidence of greater total brain volume compared to the control group. And in the second publication that a single dose of hepatitis B vaccine routinely administered to human infants at birth resulted in significant delays in the development of root, snout, and suck reflexes compared to unexposed animals.

Disturbing indeed.

Multidisciplinary, observer-blinded, placebo-controlled studies that find vaccines have a negative impact on the brains of young primates.

Remember the headlines? The swift response by the CDC? The calls from the American Academy of Pediatricians to only give Hepatitis B vaccine to infants whose mothers tested positive for the disease during delivery and for further research into the safety of vaccines?

Could it be because an observer-blinded, placebo-controlled study showed that vaccines were causing clear and documented damage to infant primate brains?

In 2008 SafeMinds was approached to help support a second phase of the ongoing study. The researchers felt so certain about the connection between vaccines and brain abnormalities at that time that they were also planning to include a Phase 3 of research, which was to test treatments to help the primates recover from neurological damage.

Since our mission is both to end the autism epidemic and find effective treatments for those with the disorder, we were delighted to contribute more funding to the researchers to further their investigations.

Then a few years later in 2012 SafeMinds was approached again to provide funding for an additional arm of the study that would expose the primates to the 1990s vaccine schedule that was not accelerated to account for difference between human babies and monkey infants. At that time the researchers reported a significant decrease in Purkinje cell number and CA1 hippocampal cell size in monkeys given the 1990s vaccination schedule at an accelerated rate based upon much more rapid brain development of the monkeys vs. human. They said they wanted to be sure the findings that “parallel those observed in post‐mortem autism brains” were not due to the accelerated schedule of vaccine administration (and to satisfy any reviewer concerns at publication).

But in reading the research published last week, the part of the study that SafeMinds specifically was asked to fund was never conducted. The scientists chose not to look at the brains of the primates from this arm of the study. They have not communicated to us why they chose not to—and they have informed us via email that they are not permitted to speak with us about the study findings or the discrepancies in what was reported to us and what was published, but we can submit our questions in writing. And that is what we are currently doing.

Now you know the back-story.

An accurate headline for Newsweek’s article, published Friday, October 2, would have been: “Scientists Publish Contradictory Research Results, Funders Are Asking Why.” Or perhaps, “Vaccine-Autism Science Still Unclear.”

SafeMinds would like to get to the bottom of the discrepancies in the science. Our overall goal is to understand what is driving the autism epidemic and to prevent these injuries from occurring and to help restore children’s health.

We don’t have a preconceived idea about what the science should show, as Firger so inaccurately reported.

But we are baffled: Why would we have been told for ten years that the researchers had found abnormal brain findings and development among the macaques if none existed? Was all of this research done incorrectly? Are all of the previous findings false?

What is the real story? The real story is simply this: Right now your child has a 1 in 68 chance of having autism. One in 68.

Think we should keep business as usual and not ask any questions about what might be triggering this epidemic?

I don’t.

I have been interviewed by the media hundreds of times. Time and again, the media skews what I say, takes quotes out of context, and uses half quotes to discredit me and downplay my credentials and expertise.

So why given this past history with the media do I continue to do interviews?

I still have hope that a reporter out there will tell the real story and fairly represent both sides without all the hyperbole and bias.

My colleague and friend Louis Conte said it best in a recent email exchange with a reporter regarding the autism community’s frustration with the media’s inability to investigate and report accurately about autism and vaccines: “You or one of your colleagues might save thousands of children from lives of pain, bring some measure of justice to those already injured, help make vaccines safer and become a damn national hero.”

You are so right, Lou, so I’m still waiting for that reporter to step up to the plate.

"Nothing is going to change my view" - that means you're close minded, you've already decided , you won't believe scientific fact whether there is 5 studies or 500. You're not open to new information. You just want to be "right", possibly to the detriment of your children.

It is not difficult to imagine that such a study would fall prey to the same kinds of methodological corruptions that were "witnessed & whistleblown" within the recent Dr Thompson / CDC / "#cdcwhistleblower" affair. After publishing findings initially in favor of the link, the study authors would have been targeted towards "motivation" to nullify the statistical effect. This was also the case, for example, in the JAMA published research of Verstraeten which initially indicated a 7x increased correlation of vaccine thimerosal with Developmental disorders. (Search "simpsonwood meeting".) The later, statistically massaged data published in JAMA failed to show a correlation.

Very frustrating indeed. Quite angering, that a body should go out of their way to raise good funds, only to find the study doesn't seem to have followed it's original model, and then the scientists create red tape around you even getting a straight answer! A representative for the study should be willing to speak to you on the phone about it, for goodness sake. What kind of customer service is that ? There are a lot of unanswered questions, and there needs to be some good answers given! It looks like they are already trying to go round the houses rather than answer you straight. Of course, the media skews the whole thing as usual, showing it's bias. Nobody is going to tell me to change my viewpoint on vaccines just because of media bias, smears and astroturfers. One look at the ingredients of vaccines tells you pretty much all you need to know! Under no circumstance would any sane person want to inject that into the blood of an underdeveloped immune system of a vulnerable infant. Callous disregard, indeed.

Dis-ease is caused by a faulty metabolism. That is all disease. The symptoms merely the result of the body instituting healing and elimination. The conditions merely the result of damage to whatever organs/tissues are affected either due to toxicosis or due to lack of nutrient for proper maintenance. Nutrition determines gene selection; likewise, toxins in the system are passed via mother and father alike during reproduction. I find it funny that so many so -called educated and professional people are still debating a very simple process of life.

Honestly has any of you people considered all the other reasons behind autism? How about our wonderful government allowing food additives ro be put in our food to make it grow bigger?. ...ever heard of Monsanto? How about red and yellow food dyes linked to genetic disorders?my parents had no health issues, then my generarion ate alot of "modified" foods. Not always by choice. Now my kids have allergies, one of my kids has more issues than she wants to admit! Gluten, nut, penicillin allergies...also skin sensitivities, ...just to name a few. I think you may only be a little rright. Maybe vaccines contribute to a very small portion of issues, but does more good than harm. No oje wants to have an autistic child, but a dead one is worse. If there is a TRUE organic anything anymore, i will be surprised. Too many pollutants...food, water, all tainted. Good luck changing all that.

Hi Mrs V, low quality and altered foods are likely to be contributing factors to autism, its severity or co-occurring conditions. There are likely to be synergistic factors, and poor nutrition may increase susceptibility to pollutants, chemicals or side effects from vaccines or other medical products like acetaminophen.

Mrs. V, you're absolutely right that things like glyphosphate-riddled GMO foods can also contribute to the current crop of illnesses, like leaky gut. HOWEVER, there are too many stories from parents who saw a sharp decline and sometimes death in their kids shortly after vaccinations.
All the troubles of your daughter can be traced back to vaccines, especially nut allergies (one of the adjuvants being used is peanut oil!) and skin issues.
One parent told me, unbidden, about her son who was born with mild autism. When he got the MMR shot, he immediately started screaming and screamed the whole following night. He didn't speak for 5 months and it took many years of heavy-duty therapy to get him somewhat functional.
My husband's nephew is in a wheelchair -- he has a genetic disease, but it didn't manifest until after the live polio vaccine.

The human mind has an amazing capability to believe almost anything it wishes to believe in which includes a vast array of religions. Many people here have invested a great deal of time, and sometimes money, in this battle. They have strong vested interests in continuing the battle no matter what the research evidence says.
The mind can dismiss mounds of evidence that goes against a certain worldview and that dismissive process can involve conspiracy theories to explain why the evidence didn't turn out as expected.
Denial is a natural protective coping mechanism of the human mind. It is commonly manifested in multiple forms of cognitive dissonance. Often it is an expression of the human ego to protect its deeply entrenched worldview.

What about the effects of vaccines on the functioning of the pineal gland in primates? Perhaps examining different parts of the brain fails to bring us any answers because toxins injected with vaccines, and absorbed into the body from the environment, are affecting the endocrine system via the pineal gland. Check out this hypothesis: http://www.securenet.net/members/aaxt/html/AndreaPaperNewFormat%282%29.pdf

"Think we should keep business as usual and not ask any questions about what might be triggering this epidemic?" ... No, but you ought to start looking at things other than the one thing we know isn't causing it.

Ryan, why would one inject aluminum into the bloodstream? THAT in itself is criminal, unkess one thinks that there is some benifit to it. There is no proof of vaccines EVER preventing ANYTHING, but lots if evidence of harm and death.

Glog,
You're joking about the "There is no proof of vaccines EVER preventing ANYTHING, but lots if evidence of harm and death" sentence, right?
To show proof, you merely need to read the statistics of preventable diseases for the past 50 years.
I mean, c'mon, polio? Without going into any of the others that have either gone down tremendously or been outright eradicated from actual harm, polio. Now let's look at measles. Measles have been going down to almost non-existent until when? About the time anti-vaxxing became the thing; now they're (slowly at this time) increasing in number.
There is proof that vaccines are helpful. Yes, there is proof that vaccines are detrimental to a few (in global numbers); but there's also proof that since their inception many deadly diseases have been all but wiped out from effectiveness. "So long as the vaccine is used."
As it stands, currently the only thing there isn't any proof of at this time is that vaccines cause autism. That's the ONE thing about vaccines, beneficially or detrimentally, that has not held up to proof at all.

Jordan, actually, you're wrong that there is no proof that vaccines cause autism. Have you not heard of CDC sr. scientist Thompson, whistleblower?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/220807175/123-Research-Papers-Supporting-the-Vaccine-Autism-Link
Most contagious illnesses did a huge drop BEFORE vaccines were introduced, but naturally the vaccines got the credit.

GavDecember 27, 2015 at 8:42 pm

Most illnesses did due to hygiene, but not all. You just need to be in a room with someone that has measles and you are almost guaranteed to have a disease that kills 13 children every hour.
So yes, many did drop before vaccines, and deaths were less frequent due to medicine, however, millions of children per year were still ending up with serious life long illnesses, until vaccines came into play.
So yes, vaccines got plenty of credit, and rightly so.

Am I right in understanding, that the major complaint SafeMinds has, is that money was put towards the raising, killing, and analysis of the "1990s pediatric" group's brains, and that the final killing and analysis didn't occur?
Here's the PNAS article: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/40/12498.full.pdf
p. 2:
"The neuroanatomical analyses were first performed in brains from the 1990s Primate and 2008 groups, as animals in these groups received the highest amount of EtHg exposure (1990s Primate) or the most extensive vaccine exposure (2008).
Because no neuronal differences were found in either of these vaccine groups compared with the control group, no additional vaccine groups were fully studied"
and p. 4:
"For neuropathology, only animals in the 1990s and 2008 vaccine groups were studied because the 1990s schedule had the highest thimerosal exposure, and the 2008 schedule had the greatest number of different vaccines and is very similar to the vaccine schedule currently recommended for US infants."
I'd argue it's pretty clear why they "chose not to look at the brains of the primates from this arm of the study", because it would have killed more primates than necessary, and the scientists have ethics! (Or, at the very least, would have to answer to an animal ethics board about why they continued with the study.)

Rebecca, are you sure that the investigators were so humane that they simply didn't want to kill the animals in the lower-exposure group in research funded by SafeMinds, or did they just not want to devote the time and effort necessary to evaluate the brains of animals that received less exposure to thimerosal and a more relaxed vaccine schedule than the animals whose brains showed no effect from vaccines?

"n davis, are you suggesting that reduced exposure to thimerosal is more dangerous, somehow?"
No.
I was intrigued by Lyn Redwood's questions: "Was all of this research done incorrectly? Are all of the previous findings false?"
The authors of earlier SafeMinds-supported work that evaluated the same animals that were used in the current PNAS paper included a lead researcher who was a parent of a child with ASD and a plaintiff in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding; she is the Research Director of the Johnson Center for Child Health & Development, which was known as Thoughtful House when Andrew Wakefield worked there; and her partner was not only Wakefield's IT expert at Thoughtful House but also a member of the Board of Directors of SafeMinds. She (Doctor Laura Hewitson) wrote: “These data are in contrast to our previous pilot study…. This discrepancy is most likely due to the larger number of animals in the present study providing more accurate estimates.” [Curtis B et al. Examination of the safety of pediatric vaccine schedules in a non-human primate model: assessments of neurodevelopment, learning, and social behavior. Environ Health Perspect. 2015 Jun;123(6):579-89.]
I think that needlessly killing animals is wrong, and I agree that sacrificing the animals in a lower exposure group would have been wrong since the evidence from higher exposure groups indicated that there was no effect from vaccines.

If you have not seen it, please purchase a DVD or go to a screening of Trace Amounts. It will explain exactly why we are seeing increases in autism, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and other chronic illnesses in our world.
http://traceamounts.com
It is narrated by a man who had a horrible reaction to some ingredients in a common vaccine as an adult.

I would like to know...Who else was involved in funding this study ? Who has bought the research scientists towards the final stages of the study ? Who got to these people ? I wonder if it was CDC or big Pharma, because clearly some outside interference has been involved. Vaccines along with other toxins in our toxic environment synergestically cause autism.

The funding sources are listed on the final page of the freely-accessible PDF:
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/40/12498.full.pdf
"We thank the following for their generous financial support: The Ted Lindsay
Foundation, SafeMinds, National Autism Association, and the Johnson and Vernick families. This work was also supported by WaNPRC Core Grant RR00166 and CHDD Core Grant HD02274."
I'd be curious to know if the Johnson family is associated with The Johnson Center for Child Health & Development (formerly Thoughtful House), and if the Vernick family are Mitch and Johanna Vernick, who are associated with Charlie's Gift/Community House?

Lyn, I truly like you, but please stop being naive. They even extorted you, don't give them another penny. Reporters have editors, beholdenend to big Pharma Devils. We don't need to prove anything, and play fair. We need a revolution, a constitutional amendment, but look what has happened in California. They even stole the referendum petition. Join the million man march with the Nation of Islam, Oct. 10 in Washington and/or at the CDC, Oct. 23-25 , in Atlanta, Georgia, and bring the criminals to justice.

From a fantastic commenter on the Newsweek article..I take no credit...
Here is the full study:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/24/1500968112.full.pdf
Go to this link, and look at the graphs presented which show the relationship between various behaviors and the different groups. Notice that in Figures B and D, there is something rather peculiar happening with the RED group (vaccinated with the Pediatric 1990's schedule)...do these look like there is no effect of vaccination? Even in Figure B all of the "vaccinated" groups have the opposite trend than the placebo group.
Why is none of this even discussed?
Enough on the behavioral data, lets look at the brain volumetric morphometry they present in this paper. They tell us that because previous research found differences between autistic and non-autistic children in cerebellar morphometry, they analyzed the cerebellum and found that there were no differences between groups in cerebellar hemisphere volume.
What I find interesting is that some of the previous research they mention was done by Dr. Eric Courchesne and Dr. Terry L. Jernigan at UCSD, and I was the programmer who wrote the programs which did the volumetric analyses.
Hypoplasia of cerebellar vermal lobules VI and VII in autism.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3367935
We found differences in the cerebellum, yes, but only in certain lobes of the cerebellum, and interestingly enough the lobes which were found to be smaller were precisely the ones neuropsychologists would expect to be impacted, given their known functional associations. The differences were in regions populated by purkinje cells, and it is well known that mercury damages purkinje cells specifically and the cerebellum generally:
Neuron loss in cerebellar cortex of rats exposed to mercury vapor: a stereological study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10912926
Another general finding of Courchesne's research was that the overall brain and cerebellar volumes in very young autistic children tended to be larger than controls. This difference tended to normalize as the autistic children got older.
So what does a finding of no difference between overall cerebellar hemisphere volume between mercury-exposed and control infant primates tell us? Precisely NOTHING. They did not find differences because they weren't looking in the right place.
It is also problematic that representatives of Safe Minds, one of the organizations which helped fund this research, suggest that the findings in this study were "cherry picked". Given the lack of discussion of differences which can easily be seen in their behaviorlal graphs, and the fact that they do not mention previous significant findings, and even go so far as to include their emphatic findings in the very title of the paper, I think we can add this study to the very long list of bad science trumped as final proof that vaccines do not cause autism.

You rock. As a fellow natural scientist, I know it is looking at the details that matter. You nailed it. Thank you for your true analysis. While most of our duped population is not able to hold a focus long enough to read this. This is where it is at. Thank you for posting this.

"Notice that in Figures B and D, there is something rather peculiar happening with the RED group (vaccinated with the Pediatric 1990's schedule)...do these look like there is no effect of vaccination? "
I assume your commenter is referring to figure 1, panels B and D, in which case they're reading the data wrong. These graphs are designed to show if there are negative effects that progress after the vaccine is administered (e.g. if nonsocial behaviors get higher duration or social behaviors get lower duration). So the thing that matters is the difference between the first point and the last point on the graph for each series.
But the main result seems to be, if anything, that the group exposed to the highest concentration of thimerosal (RED line) has the best results, showing almost no change in nonsocial behavior and a positive change (increase) in social behavior, even compared to the control group (BLACK) which ought to be the the "normal" animals.
Why did this happen? Who knows. But it doesn't support the idea that timerosal is making the animals worse...

Hi Christina, we did not ignore your points, but need to see the original data or more data in order to make the argument. We do not have the data points for the behavior graphs in question. While the graphs may look like exposure groups differ from controls, we need to see the data to determine if they actually are. Likewise for the brain regions: not all regions were examined in the Gadad paper. The investigators say the brains are stored and they are conducting additional analyses and we can ask that these cerebellar areas be included. A number of brain differences have been implicated in autism and only a few are covered in the published papers so far.

I am interested in reviewing, in full, the findings to date talked about in this article. The problem is that I really can't afford to purchase the results of every study referenced on this topic. The abstract is interesting but without access to the entire paper, it is difficult to know how much credibility to give it or whether it even applies. Would you be willing to share a complete copy of the research papers for review?
Thanks